Old Friends

People ask on occasion, "Whatever happened to.....?" or "Do you ever hear from....?" Well last week I had a phone call from Bobby Bell who had been an excellent 880 yards and cross country runner in the 1950's and then left the sport for a while to be a professional ballroom dancer with his wife Lily. Returning in the mid 80's he turned into one of Scotland's best coaches and the club's throwers performed superbly well under his guidance. He had a quadruple heart bypass in 1992 and shortly after left the sport for a bit. He is hale and hearty, lives in Ayrshire and mentioned the possibility of coming back to do some coaching for us. It would be good to see him back.

On Friday I had a visit from Steven Doig and his wife Gaby with their three children. Steven was a member of Fife Southern Harriers who came to Glasgow to attend Strathclyde University. He started training with us, then joined the club second claim before travelling to London to work with the Customs & Excise as a VAT man. He kept training and then joined the club first claim and ran in many races for us but mainly the Edinburgh - Glasgow. A Scottish Internationalist on track and over the country he still has the club record for the One Mile of 4:01. At his best he defeated Tim Hutchings (World Cross Silver medallist) in a mile race simply by taking the lead 450 yards from the finish and outkicking the great one! Steven ran for us in the Track League the day after his wedding before going on honeymoon: we were looking for promotuon to Division One of the Track League (5 divisions at the time) and he travelled from Kinghorn with new wife Gaby to run the 5000 metres at Crown Point. Not quite at his sharpest he nevertheless ran better than most would have done.